Steven Soderbergh takes an iPhone to a mental ward for the ‘Unsane’ trailer

The latest from Steven Soderbergh, Unsane takes the director’s experiments in low-budget digital moviemaking (Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience) to the next level of thrift. Like 2015’s Tangerine, the movie was shot entirely on iPhones (and it often looks it), but this uses the medium’s rawness for staging a terrifying thriller. Recent Golden Globe-winner Claire Foy stars as a woman who, in reporting a stalker, ends up in a mental institution. But is she crazy, or is the hospital in league with her stalker to drive her to insanity? And if it’s the latter, when the hell did the U.S. mental health system get all this funding to suddenly care so much? They can’t take in a deeply disturbed homeless person, but they can conspire to gaslight a woman for weeks on end? What gives?

Anyway, Jay Pharoah, Juno Temple, Joshua Leonard, Aimee Mullins, and Amy Irving co-star. Unsane will be the most embarrassing title to say aloud when it hits theaters March 23.

I’m struggling to see how the use of an iPhone is justified other than being a newsworthy gimmick. The only reason I don’t outright reject it is that it’s a Soderbergh film so he must have a good reason to do it.
I’m not very happy with his choice and it doesn’t look good at all, which is weird considering all of his films are usually good looking.

Yeah, it’s weird. He claimed in an interview that we would never even know–because it’s 4K!–but it looks pret-ty shitty. I get it if that’s all you can afford, a la Tangerine, but this just seems lazy and cheap.